I

THE DOOR THAT HAS NO KEY

MEN have always been searching for God. The history of the race reveals no gesture more consistently characteristic than a pathetic outreach of petitioning hands in the act of worship. Sabatier said it in a clever epigram when he coined "Mankind is incurably religious." As if, forsooth, religion were a disease from which the best efforts of mankind could not succeed in escaping. Yet even to that clever Frenchman the significant feature of this disease is its persistence in mankind through the centuries.

In that search, men have always confessed themselves conscious of barriers between themselves and God. They have been baffled by the difficulties of the mazed journey; they have paused before the complicated technique of approach. Always they have borne upon their spirits the consciousness that, try as they would, they must continue to blunder in a clumsy way up toward the things of God. Yet they have continued to do their poor best, urged on by that strange hunger which has remained insatiable through the long chapters of human history.

It occurred to some primitive mind which stood balked in the search, that probably some sin had offended the God, and had caused the barrier. The Deity had turned away his face, and must be propitiated. This idea seemed so illuminating that it became fixed in human minds.

The first step toward finding God became a deliberate effort to find the sin which separated us from God. That sin might be wholly unsuspected by me, and wholly unconnected with any moral or social issue. But I must discover the error by which I have made my God difficult to reach. From that point, I must select the correct rite, which will deliver me from the stain of that sin, and restore me to standing in the royal court. I must find the established sacred place where I shall be likely to find the God easy to reach. I must employ the services of the authorized priest in order that I may be ushered in properly. And I must drill myself in the mastery of the court vocabulary, so that my approach may be accompanied by a confident mumble of syllables which will not betray me as an outlandish barbarian. The words may represent nothing to my mind; I must say them for the sake of the tremendously important business in hand.

It is easy to imagine into what a maze of religious complexities such a conception might lead men. And that imaginary picture may be confirmed by a cross-section of human life at any subsequent period of time. Take the world into which Jesus came, as a rather adequate example.

The attempts to identify the interfering sin had reached the stage of absurdity. In the Roman world, the flights of birds were observed with implicit belief in the meaningfulness of the flock's formations against the sky. The stars were charted and the traditions of astrology were studied with meticulous care. The entrails of sacrificial animals were examined by experts in the art of divination, and all the combinations of symptoms which were discovered were hailed as revelations of the mind of God.

At Delphi, young women in trances of epilepsy were surrounded with tense attention while men tried to catch the syllables of their mumbling; and the syllables were then translated into oracles of divine wisdom. Meanwhile the Hebrews had reduced the will of God to a carefully coded set of commandments, which were supposed to reduce the demands of holiness to a definite series of legal statutes on which they could find sure footing.

They capitalized their certainty with another code revealing to them the correct sacrificial gestures which would remove the curse of the sin. Ancient tribes had burned their crops and destroyed their children in frantic expressions of repentance and appeal. The fakirs of India had subjected their bodies to agonies of self-imposed torture upon beds of spikes or in the midst of fiery flames. But the Jews could turn to the page where the statute covered the sin involved, and could in a moment or two decide exactly what class of sacrificial investment would serve to secure pardon.

The world was dotted with holy places, where the gods were supposed to be near at hand. Greek temples on the brow of lovely hills, wayside shrines, the muddy waters of the sacred Ganges, "this mountain or at Jerusalem," everywhere men sought God in appointed spots. And they brought to their assistance the expert advice of the authorized priests, who wore the proper garments and who knew the traditions of success. The courtesies of this divine diplomacy were not to be easily mastered by amateurs, and men were fairly busy with other things, so they retained for their use a staff of technical religionists, whose services could be utilized when they were needed. These experts, of course, were responsible